I
n December 2009 world leaders gathered in Copenhagen to form a global climate treaty. At the negotiations, any lingering doubts about China’s importance to the politics of climate change disappeared. One of the more troubling features of the summit was that the final text, the Copenhagen Accord, did not even mention a shared global ambition for emissions reductions. When journalists gathered to ask Lars-Erik Liljelund, the Swedish climate ambassador, why the goal of an 80 percent global emission reduction by 2050 had disappeared, he said: “China don’t like numbers.”1Sincethe Copenhagen summit, however, China’s position on global warming has changed markedly. In September 2015 Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping announced a U.S.- China Joint Presidential Statement on Climate Change, outlining a “common vision for the Paris climate agreement” supported by domestic policy announcements, and even new commitments on climate change.2 China has also received a lot of positive attention for its massive investments in renewable electricity generation. In 2019, the year before the COVID-19 pandemic, renewable power generation capacity grew by 9.5 percent to 750 gigawatts.3 And in October 2020 China announced that it aspires to become carbon neutral by While2060. the world observes China’s new policies with a curious combination of admiration, awe, envy, and skepticism, the future and fate of the global climate are increasingly being decided elsewhere. According to
INTRODUCTION
the International Energy Agency’s India Energy Outlook (2021), for example, current policies would leave India’s energy demand in 2040 about 70 percent above the year 2019, despite the economic hardship caused by COVID-19 in 2020–2021.4 Based on these numbers, India is to play a pivotal role in the future of the global climate. While China has already completed its industrial transformation, India is still at the early stages of the process. India’s massive and growing population, which will soon be larger than China’s, also guarantees that sustained economic growth will translate into large increases in the demand for energy and natural resources. These increases, in turn, will have massive effects on the global environment. India will play a decisive role in shaping planetary conditions, depending on whether it meets its energy and resource demands through sustainable (e.g., wind and solar power) or unsustainable (e.g., coal) means. And it’s not just India. In 2019 over a billion people lived in sub-Saharan Africa.5 The consumption of energy and natural resources per capita remains low in this region, but it will skyrocket unless these countries fail to achieve their aspirations of economic development. If India reaches a high level of economic development in the next three decades, then subSaharan Africa will be the next economic frontier. Each such transition means that billions of people consume much more energy and many more resources today. Unless these countries manage to replace coal with cleaner alternatives, such as renewables like wind and solar power, the consequences for the global climate are serious. In global environmental politics, the twenty-first century is the century of previously poor countries that are undergoing an economic transformation and thus enjoy rapid economic growth—the century of emerging economies.
Climate change is not the only way in which emerging economies are shaping the future of life on planet Earth. Consider the rampant deforestation from the world’s ravenous hunger for palm oil—the world’s most popular vegetable oil, used not only in cooking and foodstuffs but also in products such as shampoo. The production of palm oil in Malaysia and Indonesia is a major driver of rainforest destruction,6 and environmental groups frequently complain about the unsustainable land use practices of the industry.7 By 2016 India had already become the second largest consumer of palm oil, with an annual consumption of 10.3 million tons— behind only Indonesia (11.7 million tons).8
2 INTRODUCTION
Or, take mercury. When the international community finished the negotiations on the Minamata Convention on Mercury in October 2013, it had to grapple with the fact that 40 percent of global mercury emissions came from East and Southeast Asia, while sub-Saharan Africa was responsible for 16 percent, Latin America for 13 percent, and South Asia for 8 percent.9 In fact, emissions from North America and Europe, though historically important, were almost negligible in the global picture by that time. Again, economic activity in emerging economies and least developed countries currently generates a lion’s share of the global problem. The geographic distribution of mercury emissions reflects the corresponding distributions of industrial and natural resource extraction activity, and these activities are increasingly concentrated outside the industrialized West and East Asia.
The common thread running across these seemingly unrelated cases is the combination of explosive economic and population growth. The global population grew from four to seven billion between 1974 and 2012, and most of this growth was found in initially poor Asian countries.
To see how momentous this ongoing shift is, consider that by 2030, there will be 700 million more air conditioners in the world.11 Because cooling is very energy-intensive, Americans today use 5 percent of their electricity for air conditioning—and Americans consume a lot of electricity per capita when compared to most countries. As countries around the world install close to a billion new air conditioners, global electricity demand in the residential sector is bound to grow rapidly, even after adjusting for efficiency improvements. If this electricity demand is met by clean sources, such as renewable electricity, then the impact on the global environment may be limited. But if the electricity demand is met by fossil fuels, the world is in for a dramatic expansion of carbon dioxide emissions.Allthis goes to show that we now live in a world of emerging economies, and this structural shift in international political economy puts immense pressure on the global environment. Regions such as South Asia
INTRODUCTION 3
Driven by China’s phenomenal economic growth after the economic reforms in 1978, the world’s real GDP per capita increased from U.S. $3,729 to $7,614 between 1978 and 2008.10 At the same time, China’s GDP per capita increased eightfold and India’s fourfold. Africa saw a 50 percent growth in real GDP per capita between 1970 and 2008.
4 INTRODUCTION and sub-Saharan Africa will soon be the main engines of global economic growth. Populations in these areas demand energy and natural resources for industrial activity, services, and household conveniences. As governments strive to meet these demands, the potential for resource depletion and pollution grows. These countries now have more “power to destroy” than ever before,12 and they can threaten other countries with environmental deterioration. In 2019 China’s greenhouse gas emissions exceeded those of all OECD countries taken together, while India’s emissions exceeded those of the European Union.13 In the past, the global South—or the “Third World,” as these countries were called during and after the Cold War—played a different role.14 In the twentieth century the economic importance of countries outside the capitalist West and the socialist Soviet bloc was negligible, with the exception of natural resources such as oil, natural gas, fisheries, and rainforests. Back then, these emerging economies did not yet consume enough energy and resources to shape global environmental outcomes across the board. They had power to destroy, and therefore a major role to play in debates such as population control, deforestation, and fisheries. But they were marginalized in other negotiations, such as ozone depletion and climate change, because their energy and resource consumption was still quiteThelimited.ongoing transformation of the world economy shapes global environmental politics, and this book offers an analytical framework and an empirical assessment of global environmental politics in a world of emerging economies. In this world, the number of countries pivotal to avoiding global environmental destruction is higher than ever before. These countries’ growing energy and resource consumption means they have the power to destroy, yet they are also very different from the industrialized nations. For one, their governments’ environmental concern mostly remains relatively weak, despite growing ecological mobilization. More important, their institutional capacity to formulate effective environmental and energy policy is constrained. This interaction among (1) growing power to destroy through energy and resource consumption, (2) still relatively weak environmental preferences, and (3) a lack of institutional capacity is key to understanding the transformation of global environmental politics.
As any negotiator knows, the finding of such a compromise is not a simple process of aggregating preferences. Governments negotiate treaties under domestic constraints,18 strategically misrepresent their preferences to gain concessions,19 and make decisions under institutional rules that may complicate bargaining.20
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS: A PRIMER
The other main problem is enforcement: in the “anarchic” international system,21 there is no world government that can force parties to an agreement to comply with it—or, as Barrett 22 would add, even remain parties to it. International environmental cooperation requires that members of a treaty adjust their behavior (policies, programs, and so on) in a way that benefits others. Every member of a treaty facing such requirements faces the temptation to free ride by contributing a little less than it should, in the hope that it can benefit from the contributions of others without paying the cost. In a well- organized domestic society, legally binding contracts can often minimize such temptations because willful defections result in a punishment, such as a fine. In international relations, however,
INTRODUCTION 5
When, why, and how can governments of the world cooperate to mitigate global environmental deterioration? Environmental problems are international when an activity within one country harms ecosystems and people in other countries. They become global when environmentally destructive activity harms many countries across the world.15 Put simply, global environmental politics is the messy business of trying to control such global, cross-country environmental destruction. Because the source and victim of the destruction do not fall under one sovereign jurisdiction, international negotiations between governments are often required to mitigate the problem. Coming to an agreement is difficult for many reasons, but two of them are fundamental.
One is distributional conflict: governments that contribute significantly to the problem but suffer only little from it want to avoid regulations, while countries that suffer heavily from the problem but do not contribute to it prefer strict regulations.16 Governments’ preferences for different negotiation outcomes vary widely, and finding a mutually acceptable compromise—a package that enough governments can accept for a treaty to form—is the cornerstone of “environmental diplomacy.”17
Given this “problem structure,”25 distributional conflict and enforcement problems ensue. Some countries, such as the United States, generate a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. Others, such as Mali, generate virtually none. Some countries, such as Bangladesh, face near- existential threats from climate change. Others, such as Canada, are much less vulnerable and may even gain from a little warming because of enhanced agricultural productivity. Yet others, such as Saudi Arabia, are economically almost completely dependent on exports of fossil fuels. Their economic systems cannot survive without fundamental changes if large
Given the combination of distributional conflict and enforcement, any useful government-centric model of global environmental politics must consider both the negotiation and implementation of treaties. It is a general feature of international cooperation that governments first bargain over the terms of the contract and then proceed to implement the treaty if the bargaining succeeds.24 The expectation of enforcement shapes the bargaining interactions, and the bargaining outcome sets the stage for enforcement and compliance. These problems and their interaction are clearly seen in global environmental politics, as governments bargain over burden-sharing and then try to enforce compliance with the treaty.
contracts—treaties, really—are difficult to enforce: “There is no common government to enforce rules, and by the standards of domestic society, international institutions are weak. Cheating and deception are endemic.”23
6 INTRODUCTION
Today, the most famous and widely discussed global environmental problem is climate change. While I do not want to reduce the diverse field of global environmental politics into one problem, climate change nicely illustrates the basic themes of distributional conflict and enforcement. The basic premise is simple: economic activity, from deforestation to burning coal for electricity generation, generates greenhouse gases that warm the planet and thus generate problems such as sea-level rise and extreme weather events. The geographic location of emissions sources is irrelevant, however, as greenhouse gases spread into the entire atmosphere and affect everyone, from Iceland to Chile to Myanmar. When the government of a country decides to invest in coal—the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel—it understands that others bear much of the environmental cost. American households do not pay the price when floods caused by climate change threaten livelihoods in Bangladesh.
Global environmental problems can also be grouped under two primary categories: pollution and resource depletion.28 When economic activity within a country produces pollutants that travel to other countries in the atmosphere, the first country’s policies and decisions are of concern to other countries. Climate change is one such problem; others include ozone depletion, sulphur emissions, and mercury emissions. Of these four examples, climate change and ozone depletion are the quintessential global problems because the effects of pollution do not depend at all on the location of the source. While the vulnerability of ecosystems and societies to climate change and ozone depletion depends to a large extent on their location, the harmful environmental phenomenon itself is truly global: there is only one atmosphere, only one ozone layer. In contrast, sulphur emissions and mercury emissions are more localized in that the source of the pollutant determines the range of the pollution.29
Enforcement remains an equally severe problem. Even if these governments can agree on a treaty, implementing it will be difficult. If a large country such as Russia fails to achieve its emissions targets, who dares to punish it? If a large country such as the United States fails to ratify the agreement, who can coax it to join? International scholars have long argued that the difficulty of enforcing contracts, commitments, and pacts is maximized between countries because there is no government with a Weberian monopoly of violence to punish defectors and violators.27 From the perspective of international relations, then, global environmental problems are among the hardest to solve. They require countries to refrain from unilateral policies that benefit them, and only because these policies harm ecosystems and people in other countries. Even worse, the group of other countries often covers the entire globe, creating maximal incentives to free ride.
The other category of environmental problems is resource depletion. Many natural resources are “commons” in that they are nobody’s private or sovereign property.30 Such resources create problems because
INTRODUCTION 7
countries move away from fossil fuels. When the governments of these different countries negotiate, they have very different preferences for outcomes: they are more worried about emissions reductions than they are worried about climate change itself. Government preferences, in turn, reflect domestic distributional conflict between interest groups.26
8 INTRODUCTION
Another way to classify global environmental problems is to distinguish between “green” and “brown” problems.33 Green problems are traditional environmental problems that threaten ecosystems, species, and, in the long run, human societies. They include issues such as climate change, ozone depletion, deforestation, and habitat destruction. Brown problems, in turn, are environmental issues that have a direct, immediate, and localized effect on human beings. Examples include soil erosion, groundwater depletion, and the pollution of rivers. In 1971 a group of intellectuals from the global South authored the so-called Founex report and explained the environmental foes of the Third World: However, the major environmental problems of developing countries are essentially of a different kind. They are predominantly problems that reflect the poverty and very lack of development of their societies. They are problems, in other words, of both rural and urban poverty. In both the towns and in the countryside, not merely the “quality of life,” but life
individual businesses and governments have incentives to overuse them. For example, oceanic fisheries have collapsed because the fishing fleets of the world use advanced technologies to catch so many fish that the stock cannot renew itself. Similarly, although forest resources are in some sense national because they fall under a sovereign jurisdiction, they furnish many benefits to people in other countries as well, and thus governments clear too much forest for economic purposes. Although many of the early concerns about resource scarcity focused on nonrenewable resources, such as fossil fuels or minerals,31 these fears have proven largely unfounded thanks to the abundance of key nonrenewable resources. As companies have explored for resources or developed substitutes for them, they have been able to postpone conditions of scarcity. Today, concerns about depletion instead relate to renewable resources, such as groundwater, fisheries, rainforests, and habitat in general. These resources have proven to be fragile and vulnerable to exploitation, and as the numbers and economic activity of humans continue to expand, the consumption of such resources increases. New problems continue to appear, including the threat of widespread plastic pollution to the oceans. Recent assessments suggest that many renewable resources are under severe stress and present a much more imminent threat to human wellbeing than the scarcity of nonrenewable resources does.32
Unfortunately, cooperation is hard. Because actors promise to change their behavior to the benefit of others, they face the temptation to break their promises and thus avoid costly adjustments. Achieving cooperation requires solving distributional conflicts about who gets what and who pays for it,40 enforcing commitments through mechanisms such as “tit for tat” reciprocity,41 and monitoring behavior and outcomes.42
INTRODUCTION 9
37 According to Keohane, “cooperation” occurs when actors adjust their behaviors to achieve a collectively desirable outcome, as compared to the baseline of what individually rational choices would produce.38 The key element of this definition is that each actor changes its behavior to the benefit of others, and everyone benefits— possibly to different degrees—from this collection of adjustments. Keohane is careful, however, to avoid conflating cooperation with “harmony,” a situation in which individually rational behaviors are collectively desirable because there is no conflict of interest. Cooperation is necessary exactly because individually rational behaviors generate bad outcomes. In the case of global environmental politics, these bad outcomes are environmental deterioration—be it pollution or resource loss—and its negative effects on nature and human societies.39
itself is endangered by poor water, housing, sanitation and nutrition, by sickness and disease and by natural disasters. These are problems, no less than those of industrial pollution, that clamour for attention in the context of the concern with human environment. They are problems which affect the greater mass of mankind.34
The brown-green distinction has generated a spirited, and often acrimonious, debate among scholars and practitioners. Industrialized countries have by and large solved their brown problems with domestic policy, and so their environmentally aware populations tend to emphasize green problems. But in emerging countries, brown problems are often more salient and immediate, as they harm the lives and livelihoods of poor people.35 Thus an important cleavage in global environmental politics concerns the relative importance of brown versus green issues.36
The common thread running through global environmental problems is the need for global cooperation.
If cooperation is hard, North-South cooperation—between industrialized and emerging countries—has proven that much harder. Ever since the first global summit on the environment in Stockholm in 1972,
10 INTRODUCTION
The stirrings of demands for the political rights of citizens, and the economic rights of the toiler came after considerable advance had been made. The riches and the labour of the colonized countries played no small part in the industrialization and prosperity of the West. Now, as we struggle to create a better life for our people, it is in vastly different circumstances, for obviously in today’s eagle- eyed watchfulness we cannot indulge in such practices even for a worthwhile purpose.
Today,technology.Indira Gandhi’s words are more important than ever, for global environmental politics is increasingly about the preferences and choices
emerging countries have expressed numerous concerns about the possible negative effects of multilateral environmental cooperation on their ability to develop economically.43 When the prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, gave her speech on the environment to the United Nations community in Stockholm on June 14, 1972, she highlighted the difficulties that the world’s poor countries face at a time when industrialized countries have exploited the poor for economic purposes:44
She then drew the conclusion—one that has become a common thread running through North-South environmental politics over the past four decades:Onthe one hand the rich look askance at our continuing poverty— on the other, they warn us against their own methods. We do not wish to impoverish the environment any further and yet we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people. Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters? For instance, unless we are in a position to provide employment and purchasing power for the daily necessities of the tribal people and those who live in or around our jungles, we cannot prevent them from combing the forest for food and livelihood; from poaching and from despoiling the vegetation. When they themselves feel deprived, how can we urge the preservation of animals? How can we speak to those who live in villages and in slums about keeping the oceans, the rivers and the air clean when their own lives are contaminated at the source? The environment cannot be improved in conditions of poverty. Nor can poverty be eradicated without the use of science and
INTRODUCTION 11
of the world’s poor majority. The days of economic gloom and doom in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are long gone. The powerful combination of population growth and economic dynamism ensures that the rate of global environmental deterioration is now in the hands of governments that rule poor but growing countries. This change in international political economy is moving global environmental politics into new directions, and this volume deals with the nature, origins, and consequences of these changes.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS
This book aims to understand and explain how key trends in the world economy and international relations shape global environmental politics in the twenty-first century. I aim for a robust analytical framework that captures the most important drivers of change. These are the number of relevant governments, their preferences regarding environmental outcomes, their structural power, and their institutional (i.e., implementation) capacity. None of the drivers is new to the literature, but scholars have yet to put these pieces together. The ultimate goal of the analytical exercise is to understand and assess the value of global environmental cooperation relative to a business-as-usual scenario.45 My analytical framework is old-fashioned in that it emphasizes the behavior of governments. Nonstate actors, ranging from private businesses to foundations and environmental groups, play an important role in global environmental governance today. They monitor state behavior,46 exercise private authority,47 and lobby for policies in national capitals and international summits alike.48 And yet the fact remains that governments alone can enact and implement policies that set real constraints on environmental destruction. No other authority has the ability to formulate the policies needed to stop environmental destruction, and there is no change to this fundamental reality on the horizon. The most important decisions at the global level remain in the hands of sovereign governments, as they alone negotiate and implement treaties that move countries from the unsustainable business as usual toward better outcomes through reduced environmental deterioration.
The total impact of a society on the environment is but the product of population size and per capita impact, which in turn consists of the product of technology and affluence.50 Population growth and technology continue to change, but the transformation of global environmental politics ultimately stems from the increased affluence in emerging economies.
Where I depart from classical accounts of global environmental politics is my emphasis on governments instead of states. In the past, scholarship on global environmental politics often assumed that states are unitary actors.49 While this approach is parsimonious and focuses on some very important issues of cooperation, such as the difficulty of collective action, it is not at all suitable for an analysis of drivers of change. As I will show, the most important changes and developments underway in global environmental politics stem from deeper transformations in the world economy. Governments are the most important actors shaping and responding to these transformations, but they do so in an environment populated by business, political opposition, civil society, and public opinion.Let’snow look at the four drivers of change. The combination of global economic and population growth has significantly increased the number of relevant players in many environmental negotiations of global import. Many emerging countries have controlled important natural resources and large populations from the early years of global environmental politics, but they have only become important producers and consumers of goods and services over time. The basic driver of the growing number of players in the system is the combination of population and economic growth that I have already used to motivate this research. As large populations in emerging countries grow wealthy, they generate environmental impacts through increased industrial activity, consumption of energy, consumption of natural resources, and waste.
While concerns about “overpopulation” have a long history, they are misplaced unless they consider differences in per capita consumption. The real environmental challenge is a large, affluent population using inefficient, polluting technology.
These changes add to “power to destroy”51 in emerging economies. A government can be said to have lots of power to destroy when its population and economy can, without environmental safeguards, cause substantial deterioration in the quality of the local environment. Countries with
12 INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION 13
large and wealthy populations tend to have more power to destroy than small countries trapped in poverty, given that the potential environmental impact of a country is essentially the size of the population multiplied by per capita pollution and resource depletion.52 Given the importance of the power to destroy in global environmental politics, rapid economic growth in emerging economies makes their governments more important players in global environmental negotiations than was the case in the past.
powerful governments differ in two important ways from the pivotal players of the previous century. The first is that their environmental preferences remain relatively weak. This is quite understandable and justified, given the necessity of economic growth to alleviate poverty, build infrastructure, and create jobs. Emerging economies still have lower per capita emissions than industrialized countries, and their historical responsibility for environmental destruction is limited because their economic growth started only recently. Their large populations do not enjoy the luxurious lifestyles that are common in the industrialized world.
Although emerging economies hold the power to destroy the global environment, their relatively low level of economic development means that economic growth remains an overriding priority for them. If governments of major industrialized countries have sometimes opposed environmental cooperation, such opposition has often reflected domestic political or institutional constraints, as in the case of the United States not ratifying multilateral treaties that would not pass the Senate or that
Although the product of population size and per capita resource destruction is mechanically a correct representation of a society’s environmental footprint, this product also shapes global environmental politics by shaping the relative bargaining power of different governments. When a government oversees and controls a large and growing population that promises to consume more and more resources over time, it can threaten to cause global environmental degradation simply by doing nothing—by failing to implement environmental and energy policies. This threat, in turn, allows the government to demand concessions, such as financial contributions or transfers of clean technology, from other governments. Depending on the responses of other governments, such power to destroy could not only have distributional consequences—how the pie will be divided—but also change the extent and impact of environmental cooperation.Thenewly
way newly powerful countries differ from previous ones is the lack of institutional capacity, which I define as “an inability to actually implement” the policies needed to minimize environmental deterioration.53 The important word here is “actually,” as the lack of institutional capacity need not mean the government wants to reduce pollution, cut waste, or sustain renewable resources. A lack of institutional capacity prevents governments from solving their environmental problems, or perhaps complying with environmental treaties, when they simply cannot do the job of protecting the environment. A simple example of this problem is the difficulty of enforcing air pollution regulations when the environmental ministry does not have the resources to hire competent and honest inspectors to visit factories and measure their pollution output. Sometimes there are simply not enough inspectors to credibly threaten factory owners with penalties for noncompliance; other times, the problem is that the state pays so little that the inspectors are willing to look the other way for a Thebribe.major economies of the twentieth century, in North America and Western Europe, had the administrative capacity to enact and implement effective policies. Their governments had, over centuries, built an administrative state that is able not just to enact but actually to implement sophisticated policies, such as markets for emissions trading. Today’s emerging powers, however, are often growing without having built such institutional capacity. The lack of a long history of state building means that the implementation of the complex policies required to protect the environment is challenging. This challenge is compounded by the rapidly changing socioeconomic profile of these societies, as well as the prioritization of capacity building in areas related to national security or economic growth. Industrialized countries have built up their environmental governance systems for decades, whereas such pursuits are very recent for most emerging economies.
The key implication of these changes is the growing importance of capacity constraints as an obstacle to global environmental cooperation.
14 INTRODUCTION
would require major changes in domestic legislation. In contrast, pivotal emerging economies share a commitment to economic growth, and while they are sensitive to environmental problems, such sensitivity is still new and mostly reflects practical concerns about public health and resource
security.Thesecond
INTRODUCTION 15
In the past, the prospect of environmental deterioration came from countries with relatively high levels of institutional capacity, but this relationship is now broken. Already today, global environmental politics revolves around ways to enhance institutional capacity at the regional and national levels. This need to invest in capacity is not a simple technical issue, however, because the lack of capacity has complex implications for domestic politics, international bargaining, and enforcement of treaty commitments in the global environmental realm. I thus propose that debates on external support for institutional capacity will play an increasingly important role in global environmental politics of the twenty-first century.
The ideal comparison for understanding the role of institutional capacity is between China and India. Over the past decades, both emerging economies have grown rapidly and asserted themselves as the two pivotal players in global environmental politics. As I venture to show below, however, their patterns of growth, domestic environmental policy, and global environmental positions could not be more different. China’s growth has been fueled by impressive gains in institutional capacity over time, and as a result the Chinese government has also been able to mitigate the environmental damage caused by the country’s breakneck economic expansion and unprecedented poverty alleviation. At the same time, India’s economic growth has occurred in spite of stringent and persistent limitations of institutional capacity. Consequently, the Delhi government has been, compared to its counterpart in Beijing, much less effective in securing high rates of economic growth while mitigating the environmental impact.
Because most remaining emerging economies of the world are much closer to the Indian realities than to the Chinese ones, institutional capacity is emerging as a key policy issue. When emerging economies grow despite limited institutional capacity, the environmental impact of their economic expansion is severe. Institutional capacity would allow these governments to control their growth trajectories, minimize negative externalities, and plan for the run. China’s impressive gains in environmental protection show the benefits of investment in institutional capacity, but realizing these benefits is a major challenge to the growing emerging economies, as decades of experience with governing economic development
Thisshow.54problem is particularly severe in negotiations on economy-wide issues, such as the use of fossil fuels or land. The main exception to this
16 INTRODUCTION
general rule is that when treaty negotiations focus on a specific substance or a narrow sector, a conventional approach with rigid, uniform rules remains viable because the narrow focus of the treaty circumvents the more difficult political conflicts surrounding the negotiations. The playbook of the twentieth century, which saw lots of success in issues ranging from ozone depletion to marine oil spills, remains relevant to specific issues, such as stopping the use of specific environmentally destructive substances. However, it has become obsolete for the challenge of minimizing the total environmental impact of population growth and economic expansion in emerging economies. Old wine in new bottles will not be enough to save the planet, because the most important environmental pressures stem from a growing demand for energy and natural resources. There is no silver bullet that can break the strong link between energy use, resource consumption, and environmental deterioration. Cleaner products help in some cases, and improved energy or resource efficiency can
FIGURE 0.1 Summary of the argument. Emerging economies’ growing power to destroy complicates global environmental cooperation, and this effect is amplified by weak environmental preferences and limited institutional capacity.
W hat does the global environmental policy landscape look like in the age of a rising Global South? This book explains why emerging economies have come to dominate global environmental politics and examines the implications for future international cooperation. Johannes Urpelainen shows that emerging economies continue to prioritize economic growth and often have limited institutional capacity to contain the environmental destruction that this growth causes. However, he argues, despite barriers to cooperation, innovative bargaining and institutional design offer a way forward. The book features detailed discussions of attempts to address hazardous chemicals, loss of biodiversity, and climate change; a comparative analysis of China and India, two critical emerging economies; and case studies of nine other emerging economies around the world. Global Environmental Politics is an essential, forward-looking overview of today’s most pressing international issue.
—JOSHUA BUSBY, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
—ROBERT FALKNER, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
“Urpelainen provides a masterful primer for the challenges of the new global environmental governance. As developing countries get wealthier, their capacity to destroy the environment increases, but compared to advanced industrialized countries they have weaker environmental preferences and less state capacity to address environmental problems. These developments complicate how global challenges like climate change can be addressed.”
JOHANNES URPELAINEN is the Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Professor of Energy, Resources, and Environment at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the founding director of the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including Renewables: The Politics of a Global Energy Transition (2018) and Escaping the Energy Poverty Trap: and How Governments Power the Lives of the Poor (2018). UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK
“Emerging economies are critically important to the future of the planet’s health. Their economic success and growing energy and resource consumption have turned them into pivotal players in international environmental negotiations. Urpelainen’s excellent book provides an essential guide to this new reality of environmental diplomacy.”
COLUMBIA
CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee Cover photo: Paulose NK / © Shutterstock PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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